'Scam Victims United' Web site tells a sad story

By DAVID FLAUM, GUEST COLUMNIST

Published
10:00 pm PST, Thursday, March 6, 2003

By now, most people have received or heard about "Nigerian letters," those missives by mail, fax and e-mail from government officials or their widows or bankers in all sorts of countries, offering you a huge chunk of cash if you will only help them get money out of the country.

While there has been a big increase in the volume of those letters in the past year, scam artists -- possibly the same ones sending the letters -- have fashioned a new twist to get people's money, said Rick Harlow, a Secret Service special agent who investigates many of these proposals.

Jeff and Shawn Mosch, a Minneapolis couple who were taken for $7,200, started a Web site, Scam Victims United, to tell people about the scheme.

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Here's what happened to them, Shawn Mosch said.

The couple posted ads on the Internet to sell Jeff Mosch's 1961 Buick Special. Among the inquiries was an e-mail from a man claiming to be a car dealer in Africa.

He said he was willing to pay for the shipping as well as the car, but because of currency exchange problems, he wanted the Mosches to accept a cashier's check from a business associate in the United States for $8,800, then wire $7,200 to the people who were going to handle the shipping.

The Mosches agreed, received and deposited the check, waited a week until their bank told them it cleared, then wired the money to the supposed shipping company.

"That's the last we heard from them," Shawn Mosch said. That was in November.

"The first day (after the couple learned the check was counterfeit), my husband and I said, 'How could we be so stupid?' " she said. "But the only stupid thing we did was to trust our bank. That's what got us in trouble."

A week later, they rolled out the Web site, which has had 13,000 hits since the first week in November, Shawn Mosch said.

In April, he put ads on several Internet sites to sell his 1998 Sebring.

He received an offer from a Nigerian man and, after a month of exchanging e-mails, agreed to accept a $23,500 check from the Nigerian's "client" in the United States to cover the $13,000 price of the car and shipping with the remainder going back to the Nigerian, Bowles said.

He got the check and, five days later, thinking it was good, wired $7,800 to the man in Nigeria.

A few days later, he found out the check bounced, and he was out the $7,800, Bowles said.

Neither the Mosches nor Bowles had shipped a car, so they didn't also lose their merchandise. But Shawn Mosch said she has heard from sellers of cell phones and accessories, computers, laptops and other goods who fell victim to the scam but shipped and lost their possessions as well.

Harlow said sellers in cases that the Secret Service has investigated are offered more than the product they are selling is worth and that appeals to sellers' greed. And the buyers' reasons for wanting to send up to five or six times the value of the item for the excess to be wired back to the buyer seem plausible, Harlow said.

He provided some tips about selling something on the Internet:

Never ship anything without confirming that the check to pay for it has cleared.

Never accept or cash a check for more than the agreed-on purchase price.

People should never forward funds out of the country unless they know the person they are sending the money to.